The Lesser Fool
by Juniorstarcatcher
Summary: Released from her time as a lab rat at Trask Industries, Ruby Warmin is quietly shuffled to Holbrook Hospital, a psychiatric facility in upstate New York. Having traded one prison for another, Ruby struggles with a system rigged against her. But, when Alex Summers is admitted, fresh from Vietnam and his diagnosis with PTSD, Ruby feels that freedom is closer than she ever imagined.
1. Chapter 1

_"I don't care what consequence it brings. I have been a fool for lesser things."_

* * *

Alex Summers is an anomaly when it comes to the Holbrook Hospital. Well, Alex Summers is an anomaly when it comes to most things in this life, but he is particularly an anomaly when it comes to this. Nurses raise their eyebrows and doctors tut harshly under their breath when they read his file, shaking their silent, disapproving heads as they read the words stamped above his name, a stark red death sentence staining the tan paper beside his processing photograph.

_Self Admission._

Yes. He is the only member of their happy little Holbrook family to have ever admitted himself to their care, at least as far back as anyone can remember. It's an oddity. It's not, frankly, even generally considered accepted practice. Admissions have to be carefully screened, carefully picked through and examined. There are considerations to be taken in about the patient's physical health and comfort level, even before they are assessed for their mental health. And when Alex Summers walked through the front door of the administration building, his black combat boots glinting from the fresh polish he gave them this morning and his green jungle fatigues stretching broad across his shoulders with his embroidered name and rank proudly displayed over his heart, truth be told, the women in the front office did not exactly anticipate him the sort that they would be allowed to bend the rules for. There are no ticker-tape parades for the men coming back from Vietnam. And with military salaries too low to even be considered proper income, the secretaries and nurses smoking in the front office hardly thought he would be able to buy his way into their midst.

But, all the same, he is admitted that very night and given a tour before lights out. He sees it all. The four wards that house the patients. The Recreation room. The dining hall. The Courtyard. The therapy centers and offices. It's a very polite campus, Alex thinks. Dainty and sturdy all at once. Just the sort of place someone like him needs to be locked up. Just the sort of place he belongs. He has chosen this. The longest they will keep him in voluntary confinement is a month, but he reassures himself that a month of the outside world being safe from him is better than none. And if he's not better in a month, they'll keep him longer. He can convince them to keep him. He knows he can. Alex has chosen the walls of Holbrook, has pulled the locks on his own prison doors.

That first night, the orderlies lead him to his room, a room all to himself, and the nurse giving him her guided tour ensures him that, come tomorrow, he will feel right at home here, that he will be better, healthy, in no time. On the surface, it's a comforting thought.

But when they slam the doors in Ward A, leaving Alex sitting alone on the bed, he can hear the thick iron locks slide mechanically into place over the patients' doors. A chorus of finality sings its way into his heart and he runs a shaking hand through his blonde hair, looking up at the white paint of the ceiling. Yes, he chose this. But the reality is so much greater. He is in a prison once more, all to save the world from himself.

This is going to be the longest month of his life.

* * *

Ruby Warmin can tell you everything there is to know about Holbrook Hospital. She can tell you when, down to the hour, the administration secretaries send out their monthly orders for supplies. She can tell you at what temperature the thermostat is set every morning at precisely 5:23. She can tell you how many times the worn-out copy of Billie Holiday's "What a Little Moonlight Can Do" record has played in the lounge over the last week. She can tell you how many ceiling tiles there are in nearly seventy percent of the rooms in this building and can tell you precisely how many steps it takes to get from any room on campus to the center of the exercise yard.

She learned those particular things within her first three days in captivity within these walls. Now, three months later, she has picked over the facts and mysteries left to be learned and unravelled inside this complex. Which leaves her with little else to occupy her time but sheer, unfiltered rage. It treads the hallways of her mind like a hunted, wounded animal, making the carpets of memory threadbare and leaving little energy for anything else.

Which makes controlling the young woman difficult for the staff of Holbrook, thereby making her not one of their particular favorites of the patients.

And that is how she ended up in Ward Four, tied down to the bed with leather straps that never give, no matter how many nights she spends awake writhing against them, as the sun rises and the morning bell rings in the steeple of the administration building. It's early, but it isn't any matter to her. She wasn't sleeping anyway. If she were honest with herself, which, to be completely frank, isn't something she's interested in, she would admit that she hasn't had a decent night sleep in two years.

There's something about being a prisoner that does that to a person. It makes them cagey, makes them suspicious of even themselves. Even to the point where giving into sleep feels like the most crushing of defeats.

"Warmin," comes the voice from the doorless doorframe that marks the entrance to her room.

It's a male orderly. They always send the male orderly, considering that she is a "marked" Ward Four patient, one of the worst of the worst. She turns her head as much as the restraint around her collar bone will allow her, smirking even through the pain of her bound body. The leather straps, they say, are as much for her safety as they are for anyone else's, but Ruby knows better. There isn't anything wrong with her. She has a gift, a mutation that makes her strong and vulnerable all at once. If they wanted to protect her, they would let her go. But progress on that front is slow. Crawling. To the naked and trained eye alike, unmoving, even.

"You rang?" She asks, her tone a sugar-coated lemon candy, sweet and bitter all at once, as her eyes betray her disgust for the man in the white uniform.

She has never been able to be anything but herself. A bird is still a bird, even if its surrounded by bars.

"You gonna cooperate with me this morning?" He asks in a voice from the gutter, raising an eyebrow and crossing his burly, tattooed arms across his chest.

Ruby knows his name. It's Kane Tourville, and he was a Sergeant First Class in the Army. But today, he's wearing a uniform of a different kind, though the look in is eyes is not far off from the one Ruby suspects he wore when he was killing Koreans with his bare hands. She does not let the uniform or the smile fool her, however. He isn't a doctor. He isn't a nurse. He is little more than the brutish arms that will inevitably handle her body over the course of this morning. He's the hired help, the specialist in pain and weightlifting that has been brought in to force her into submission.

But the young woman strapped to the bed isn't the slightest bit interested in submission, though she has been forced to bow her entire life.

"Not on your life," she promises, wiggling her fingers as best she can, feeling energy twitch like sparks between a rock and flint.

The restraints were tied especially tight last night, punishment for refusing to speak to the therapist she was scheduled to see yesterday before supper, leaving her hands shaking with numbness and circulation loss. She just wants her powers. She wants to unleash them with the force of an angry God.

"Then, we're going to have a fun morning, aren't we?" The man says, opening a small leather kit, laying it out on the metal table bolted to her floor as he admires the weapons of his control.

The precaution of fusing the furniture to the floor seems rather unnecessary, considering that any moment Ruby spends in this room in spent tied down without the hope of moving, but she isn't going to tell them how to do their jobs. Instead, she watches with breathless anticipation as a needle is filled with liquid from a vial. Catching sight of the not-quite clear color of water from a park fountain, the young woman in the bed knows exactly where it will end up, where it has for the last three months now. Her veins burn in memory of this morning routine, and Kane taps the glass of the needle twice before allowing the edge of the spike to drift ever closer to her skin.

She screams. She strains against the leather digging evermore painfully into her flesh, but there is no give in them, no room for her to escape or evade. But she will not stop fighting. She will not stop fighting. She twists and attempts to manipulate her fingertips. If she could just get one onto his skin. If she could only just brush him with her fingers,_ she could... She could... She..._

Ruby's world spins as the needle digs into her veins, and the injection seeps into every cell in her body before her mind goes to sleep, her eyes wide open and surveying even as her body goes slack. Now, she's little more than a corpse that can move, half-awake and steady enough to be considered practically human.

It's just now, the orderly thinks to himself as he reaches for her restraints, she's more manageable.

With enough drugs, anyone loses their will to fight.

* * *

When Ruby comes back down to the land of the living, she's seated in her usual chair in the dining hall. Someone must have led her body down the hallway, must have placed her in her customary chair at the abandoned table in the corner of the room. A resigned sigh falls from the young woman's lips. This is what defeat looks like. An exhausted mind in a broken body. She looks at the pads of her fingers, those intricate patterns drawn like snowflakes, and locks her jaw. There is no spark of energy in them, no hope of use. Those drugs that they give her, those injections that come every morning like clockwork, are neutralizers. And every morning like clockwork, she rejoins the world at this breakfast table, with her powers gone and her mind blank as a fresh canvas, with no recollection of how she made it from her bolted bed to this seat.

But this morning, there's something... Rather odd. An anamoly. She's sitting there, staring at her fingertips, wondering just how much medicine they have to squeeze into her bloodstream in order to make her this weak, when suddenly, something crosses the edges of her vision. Something strange.

A person. Another person is sitting across from her at her quarantined table in the abandoned corner of the dining hall. Neck snapping so quickly she fears she might have given herself whiplash, she looks up, her heart rate pacing at an abnormal rate that can't be healthy with all of the chemicals pulsing through her system.

And that's when she sees him. Breath catches in her chest and the powerlessness of her fingers brush themselves away to the sides of her mind's battlefield as she sees him sit across the table from her. Blonde hair brushed to the side with gel, grey hospital garb draping his body in a half a size too big, he stares down at a white paper cup in his hands, biting his lower lip as his eyebrows crease inward in apparent deep thought. Ruby thinks for a long moment, watching him, sharing in his silence until she can take it no longer.

"I'm in quarantine," she says, speaking before she's given herself time to properly think that statement through.

Eloquence is never her strongest suit when she's coming up for air after a strong dose of whatever it is that they force into her in the mornings, but even this feels a less than graceful way to greet someone. She could have said anything, anything at all. But she chose that most concise and simple of sentences, an effort to protect them both. No one has ever tried to sit with her before, but she knows that the eyes of the Hospital are everywhere, and they like their order kept. She knows this place up and down, and this man is new. A new admission. A new patient. This piques her interest, but not enough to want to call the wrath of the orderlies down upon her.

It does occur to her, for a fleeting moment, that this young man is handsome. Her age. And in any other life, she may have had cause to blush and stammer her way into talking to him. But this is the only life she's got. And there is nothing red-cheeked or amused about her expression. The last thing she needs is for this complete stranger to bring even more reason for the white-uniformed men and women keeping watch along the East wall of the room to bear down further upon her.

She's lost her powers. She's lost her ability to see anything clearly for the fog wrought down upon her by the medicine. She cannot lose her solace at the breakfast table.

The young man, however, does not hear or acknowledge her urgency. He doesn't even look up from the medicine cup in his hands. He silently counts the medicine once, then twice. Ruby allows him a moment, wondering if he has the ability to listen at all, before coughing and letting her voice carry across the table a fraction louder, strong and clear.

"I'm in quarantine. You can't sit here," she repeats, each word cut and crisp, a command that she defies him to ignore.

Never one to step down from a challenge, he looks up this time, turning frigid blue eyes directly on her.

* * *

When Alex looks up from the collection of medicine in the little white cup balanced in his hand, his breath stops short. When he arrived this morning, strolling from his room in Ward One after they did a bed inspection, which he passed with flying colors thanks to his drill sergeant in Saigon, they gave him a plate and ushered him to a corner table where a solitary young woman sat, staring at her fingertips. In all of his planning for this little sojourn, Alex forgot one thing. That people are kept in asylums for a reason. And when he sees her staring at her fingertips as though they contain the secrets to the universe, he suddenly realizes. There are people here more sick than he. And he's trapped with them for the next month. But now as he looks at her straight on, he knows that there's something else there. Not insanity. Not madness. For when he looks up at the woman across the table from him, she's staring at him with eyes a shade of cloudy brown. But that, in and of itself, isn't enough to make him pause.

It is that her right eye is peeking out from a jagged scar that travels from the midsection of the side of her nose to the middle of her forehead, an angry collection of violent red lines that draw the letter **_M_** across her face.

Alex reels at the sight, drawing in a large breath in shock. When he arrived stateside, after Raven saved his ass from Trask's experiments, he spent more than his fair share of time getting all of the research he could on the life he might have suffered.

And every photograph he found looked just like the woman staring across from him. Every mutant's face was marred with the same "**_M_**" scar. His jaw drops and the two of them lock eyes, both entranced by the other for reasons so foreign and stomach rocking that they might as well be trapped on a roller coaster over the Pacific.

Ruby does not cower at his obvious disgust at the brand she received during her time with Trask. Instead, she resigns herself to it, holding herself still so that he may have all the time in the world to stare. She has never yet met anyone to get used to the mark. Doctors still flinch and Nurses still sniff as they bristle at the sight of it. All the same, she refuses to bow her head, refuses to try and make him more comfortable at its sight.

A rush of bile rocks in the pit of Alex's stomach as he takes in the sight of that mark. That could have been him. That could have, so easily, been him. He bites his lip for a moment and then, without hesitation, throws the cup full of pills into his mouth before swallowing them dry. He can feel the memories coming up in his mind. _Green marshes and black war paint. Dirty boots and bloody dog tags. Fire, everywhere._ He can feel them threaten him. But the feeling of capsules and grainy circles clawing their way down his throat help him shove those images back into the locked closet in his mind where he hides them all. He grips the edge of the table painfully hard until he can breathe again. The waves of his panic never quite crash against the shore, which allows him to choke out:

"They told me to sit here," he says, effectively silencing her.

His mother always taught him not to stare, not to draw too much attention to anyone, not to make them feel uncomfortable, and one would think that after being on teams with Hank McCoy and Toad and Angel that he might have learned his lesson. But he hasn't. He hasn't at all. And the photograph that his mind is developing of the woman with the ugly scar will burn forever in his mind, no matter how quickly he looks away.

A million questions tickle his tongue, a million thoughts and terrors and nightmares flash in his mind, but with great effort, he confines his words to a simple, five word question that seems to open the door to every other question he will ever want to ask her. It's a question only asked inside the walls of hospitals and prisons, which to Ruby are one in the same, and it burns his tongue with the pain of battery acid as it slides out.

"What are you in for?" He asks, his voice a strained shade of casual, like taffy pulled to its longest stretch before snapping.

It isn't often that Ruby finds herself at all surprised by anything. Life inside scientific facilities and hospitals is made up of routine and order, of a script that is daily followed to the letter. But this question that seems to be asked not from his mind, but from a vulnerable place between his heart and his eyes, sends a ripple through her spine, right from the base of her neck to the seat of this plastic chair she's been uncomfortably occupying since someone led her zombie-like body in through the front doorway moments ago. Ruby doesn't want to answer. And so, easily enough, she doesn't.

"What are _you_ in for?" She snaps back.

Her fingertips are numb now, the medicine truly taking hold of her body in a visceral way that she cannot escape, and Ruby wonders if he knows. Could he know? God, she hopes he doesn't know.

Alex does know, but the obvious sidestep she's just pulled in this dance is enough to make him realize that she isn't going to lay her soul bare to him at the breakfast table. There isn't even a molecule of his body that can blame her. If he went through what she undoubtedly went through, he wouldn't be so quick to speak, either. He plays along with her question, following down the new path she's laid out for them to travel. He clasps his hands together and lays them on the table, leaning his weight slightly forward to incline himself inward, just the slightest bit closer to her. If he were to answer her honestly, he would be simple and clear. _I was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I almost killed some of my friends when I got back into the United States. I'm too dangerous to be out in the world. It's safer here, for everybody. _

But that is, perhaps, too honest for a stinted introductory conversation, so he shrugs once, giving her the simplest, most editorialized version of the gospel truth.

"I'm here to get my mind right," he says, simply.

For the first time since sitting down across from her, the young man sees Ruby chuckle. It's mirthless and inwardly cruel, and she shakes her head as she goes, leaving him the slightest bit speechless.

"You and everyone else here."

* * *

**So here is the first chapter of book two in the Ward Four Series. This series is going to be a little like American Horror Story, except flipped. Where AHS is the same people in different locations, this is the same location with different people. So, the first story (****_The Better Angels) _****features Hank and Alma and takes place between First Class and Days of future Past, this story features Alex and Ruby and takes place after Days of Future Past, and the next story is to be determined (if you have any ideas or suggestions, leave them in a review or message me on my tumblr, juniorstarcatcherfiction! **

**PLEASE leave a review! You guys have no idea how happy they make me! And please go check out ****_The Better Angels_****, the first book in this series, which has one chapter as well! **


	2. Chapter 2

Her words take the effort to speak straight from his mouth, and he puts up little by way of a fight. Across the table from one another, the two sit in complete silence. Breakfast is laid out before them by well-meaning but uncomfortable and even frightened looking hospital staff members, and then cleared again half an hour later. And while other patients at other tables mutter sentences to each other with varying levels of coherence, the two mutants sit with one another without ever even looking at each other. When the breakfast bell rings for the second time, the two of them depart to opposite ends of the hospital, returning the ways they came. Ruby returns to Ward Four, and Alex to Ward One.

But then, Alex is caught by a doctor and pulled into his office for his first counseling session. The medicine cup that they gave him before breakfast drove him away from the living nightmares that his illness constantly surrounds him with and pushes him into a heavy fog in the dead of night. His mind is in a clouded forest, dense and hard to travel. The doctor asks him question after question, and Alex is sure that he answers, as he sees the older, dignified man nod and scribble in his pad. On the corners of his memory, frayed images of firefights and steadily paling faces with blue-strained veins dance around, but there is nothing solid to them, they feel only an inch or two out of his reach, as if he could run just a little bit faster and reach them, hold them in his hands. Unfortunately, the medicine keeps his feet in cement, and his memories remain in that place just between impossible and tangible.

It doesn't feel so much like therapy as it does an unwinnable race.

Eventually, though, the man in the white lab coat beckons Alex to stand, and reaches for the young soldier's lapel. There is a brief moment of contact where the fingers of the doctor brush the cloth of Alex's clothes, and almost instantly he sees a hazy memory of a pin of the American Flag finding its way to almost the same spot, but on a green uniform instead of a grey. He feels the phantom weight of that first moment even now, as he looks down and sees what is happening in the present moment. The pin is not multicolored this time, but yellow and in the shape of a cross. Alex gulps at the sight of it and opens his mouth to ask what it means, but before a sound can even escape, he is taken out of the small, cramped office and brought into what he was told yesterday on his tour is an Exercise Yard. It isn't half bad, as far as mental hospital exercise yards go, at least, not that Alex has any other knowledge to compare it to. The grass is green and lush, manicured and well looked after as it sprawls for three acres or so before dissolving into a mass of tall green trees. There's a fountain and wrought-iron chairs. Benches. Patients mill about, some with the company of nurses and other alone.

And then, on a blanket on the center of the back lawn, Alex sees her. The girl from this morning, the girl who sat across from him without giving him the dignity of a meaningful conversation. The girl with the scar on her face. Left to his own devices out here in the yard, Alex makes the bold decision and crosses the length of the grass between the two of them, looming over her as her dark hair sweeps around her in the gentle breeze. She's reading a book, the leather bound cover of which is propped up on the knees which are bent up into her chest. He stares down at her, pushing through his medicated haze to come up with something intelligent to say.

"Hello again," she says, her voice as easy as the air blowing around them as she flips a page.

The blonde standing above her startles at the sound of her voice. It takes him a moment, wondering how she could have know that someone, much less emhe/em, was looming over her. But then, the obvious conclusion appears in his mind. His shadow. Of course. His shadow is drawn in dark shades on the grass, and she caught it from the corner of her eye as she read the fresh page of her book.

"Uh-hi," he engineers, wondering where his power of speech went when it left him.

Medication often has side effects such as these, and he plops himself down on the ground with the weight of a sack of potatoes, hoping the reverb of his body might shake the remnants of the fog from his body. While he doesn't succeed completely, it does help somewhat, though perhaps that effect is just wishful thinking. Laying his legs out in front of him, he offers her his hand, hoping she will not acknowledge the slight tremor in the bones that comes with the warning label on the bright orange pill bottle they emptied into his white prescription cup this morning.

"Alex Summers," he introduces, forcing his jaw and his vocal cords to work as they are meant to.

As the young man hopes, the woman does not acknowledge the trembling in his hands, but that is because she does not acknowledge that he has tried to shake her hand at all. Instead, she keeps her eyes focused on the book in her hand, giving it all of her attention. Well, almost all of her attention.

"Ruby Warmin," she mutters.

That is when the cold-skinned smack of realization knocks Alex across the face. He sat on her right, and thus she presents the right side of her face to him, giving him a front row seat to the jagged scar that dominates her features. An invisible hand strangles him, wrapping around his throat as his eyes do tactical reconnaissance missions around that collection of jagged scar tissues. He tries to rip the hand from his throat, claw the elephant from its resting place on his chest, clenching and unclenching his fist and fingers in an attempt to exert the energy bubbling in the prison of his ribs.

"So..."He trails, hoping to find his thoughts along the way with little success

She turns a page, ever the casual tone coming out of her.

"So..." She parrots.

The first thing that comes to his mind is not the thing he should say, but it isn't the worst thing he could have thought of, either. He settles for a few easy words, taking what he can get when it comes to his own competence.

"I had therapy today," he says before the sentence can get caught anywhere on the path between his mind and his lips.

Ruby shakes her head, letting it roll from side to side as she remarks to herself how disappointing this all is. How disappointing he is, in fact. The air around them begins to taste of bread, of the steadily rising lunch that is beginning to come out of the smokestacks of the kitchen.

"You can just say it," she mumbles.

Alex isn't particularly good at looking innocent, but he does a pretty passable job in this moment. All the same, Ruby doesn't buy it. She knows better, and has done since the moment she came to bear the face she wears now.

"I can just say what?" Alex asks, ever so slightly tightening his voice to make it sound like a plausible question.

She doesn't have the energy to play a game with him. An angry page turns in her book and she struggles to control her breathing and her own tone of voice, not wanting to make any enemies, but not looking to make a friend either. She just wants honesty from the people she can demand it from. And this kid is someone she can demand it from. She knows she is owed that much, at least.

"You stared at my scar through breakfast and now you're doing it again," she says.

Alex splutters against the accusation and indictment.

"I wasn't- I mean, I didn't-" He stammers out.

She raises an eyebrow, letting her eyes skirt to meet his from the corner of her eye for only a second before returning to her book. Her spine locks up, the vertebra grinding against each other with painful grit.

"You didn't mean to?" She questions, attempting to finish the sentence for him.

It is that moment that, like an airplane bursting from a slow crawl on a runway into the sky to find nothing but blue eternity stretching out before it, Alex shatters through the fog plaguing his mind, and allows his tongue to run away.

"So you're a mutant?" He asks.

Ruby looks down on his chest to the yellow cross now gracing his lapel, letting the yellow light glint on the yellow and wondering when yellow became such a sickening color. Yellow, yellow, yellow. In this place, it is a symbol of several distinctions. Post-partum depression, Gender-based schizophrenia, and-

"So you have PTSD?" She retorts.

It's a new disorder. Not many people are willing to diagnose patients with it. But now that the soldiers are coming back, completely unprepared to deal with the world they left when they took their oath to serve and protect, there are very few options available to any doctor dealing in psychiatric medicine. Alex looks down at his hands, gulping down hard. Yes, that's what he's here for. But he isn't going to say out loud. He's in here for the protection of those around him; he isn't here to talk about his illness.

"Is that what you're in here for? Being a mutant?" He questions.

"Yes."

"Are they allowed to do that?"

"No."

Alex furrows his brow, turning his full attention to her, noticing that she is not really reading the words on the pages of her novel, but instead, staring at it with the force of visual warfare, gripping the cover until her knuckles whiten.

"Then why are you here?" He asks.

She swallows hard, her voice trembling with the force it takes to hold her anger at bay.

"Why do you want to know?"

They're quarantined together, not that she needs to know why just yet. So, Alex settles on giving her back the information that she needs to know.

"We're gonna be eating at the same table for the next two months. Might as well be friends," he says with a shrug.

Ruby rolls her eyes.

"No one has friends in here."

For the first time this conversation, Alex chuckles to himself, taking in the yeast-soaked air, wondering all the while how he managed to let himself get dragged into the mud of this chat.

"Maybe that's the reason no one's getting any better," he responds.

Ruby wonders for a long stretch of quiet if she should tell him. After all, he has a point. Perhaps the solitude is the reason no one is sane here. Maybe they're all stuck in a world of madness because they are all just lonely. With no one to take their hand and pull them from the water, there is no way of getting onto the lifeboat that might save them. Tentatively, Ruby reaches out for the lifesaver that Alex seems to have thrown her with his words. She closes her book, sticking her finger into the pages to save her place.  
"I'm here because I survived," she says.

Alex knows he probably shouldn't ask, but he's never been great at holding his tongue. The question pops out of him like a cork from a champagne glass.

"Survived what?" He asks, suddenly intensely curious.

He needs to know. He needs to know if she came from Trask. He needs to know for sure. But, Ruby retreats into ambiguity, tightening her grip on her book until her hand shakes.

"Something bloody and painful," she responds.

Her gaze is distant, stuck somewhere in the deep basement that is the illegal testing facility of Trask Industries.

"Were you in a war?" He asks, though he knows the answer.

He hopes that guessing wrong might give her permission to speak freely, that she will want desperately to correct him and thus giving herself away. But she doesn't. Instead, she shrugs.

"Of sorts," she agrees.

She feels like she has gone through a war. He isn't sure how he feels about that. So, he asks another question that he has no business asking.

"How did you get that scar?" He asks.

Her teeth grind against each other, rubbing until they give her shivers up and down her spine. Her eyes close against the memories of the day she received it, and she fights against the storm of feelings deep down inside her.

"It's a brand," Ruby responds.

There is hope in her chest, hope that he will end this conversation, but she somehow knows that he will not. And sure enough, he follows through with the expectation she has placed on him. In contrast to the sunshine of the world around her, her mind lurks in darkness.

"What kind of brand?" Alex prompts.

Desperately, he reaches at straws, hoping that she will say it. Hoping that she will just say Trask so he can understand what he might have suffered. Perhaps that is the key to him being better, to freeing himself from his illness. Perhaps if he just knows how much worse he could have had it, perhaps he can release himself...

"You know how they put brands on cows? To mark who they belong to?" She asks.

Alex nods.

"Yeah."

She mirrors his nod.

"That kind of brand," she finishes.

That quiets Alex for a long while. Branded like livestock. Branded for slaughter and study and then thrown away when all of it was done. Thrown into a hospital when she isn't even sick. Being a mutant is like being an animal. And she's now eternally marked like one.

"So, how did you get it?" He finally whispers, unsure of how to approach the fact that she did not even answer his question the first time.

Ruby slams her book closed and the noise of it shatters the moment that Alex thought was growing between them. She places it at her side and wraps her arms around her knees, looking straight out into the horizon.

"Don't get ahead of yourself. We aren't friends yet," she snaps.

Her voice sharpens like a blade against a stone. There isn't any reason for him to know that information. He doesn't need to know about Trask and about the experiments and about... Well, about anything from that chapter in her life beyond what he can see on her face. Alex gulps, but finds hope in that one word. Yet.

"But you'll tell me someday. Right?" He asks.

She attempts to stab him with his words, but misses him by a country mile.

"Will you tell me about the war?" She barks.

He wants to ask which one she's talking about, which war she is hoping he'll divulge the secrets of to her, but he doesn't. He holds his tongue and knows that she isn't quite ready for that. She isn't ready to know about the many wars he feels he's been fighting his whole life. He just nods, his voice not unlike the quiet suburbian breeze hanging between them.

"Yeah. I'll tell you someday."

"Okay," she says, surprise creeping into her pose.

Their silence this time is comfortable, like two friends on a pond-side picnic instead of two virtual strangers out on break from their time in the mental ward. He takes her in, really takes her in, beyond the scar. And then breathes in a deep chestful of air before reaching out far enough from his little lifeboat that he risks falling out into the troublesome ocean himself.  
"You know I'm like you, right?" He asks.

Ruby's eyes widen, stretching her skin uncomfortably tight as he sees genuine shock come across her face.

"You're what?"

He repeats himself.

"I'm a mutant. Just like you."

She struggles for words before managing to ask:

"What can you do?"

He shrugs, knowing that he can't actually follow through on what he is about to suggest. Not here. Not out in the open.

"I'll show you mine if you show me yours," he suggests with a wink.

She breathes a laugh, looking at her feet which twitch in the hospital-issued shoes covering her feet. Offering him her hands, letting them stretch upward like doctors with surgery-sterile arms, she shakes her head in frustration. Oh, what she would give to be able to see his power. What she would give to show off her own.

"I can't. The medication...It does things to me."

All the same, he looks at her and smiles, hoping to encourage one out of her if he can manage it.

"Oh. Someday, then?" He hopes.

She resigns herself to a promise without a name, knowing that someday that she will be called upon to fulfill it.

"Yeah. Someday."

And even though an air of disappointment hangs like Christmas lights around them, Alex sees something in the etch of the woman's face beside him. Something lighter. Something almost like freedom. Something almost like trust. And he thinks that maybe, just maybe, they're getting somewhere.

* * *

**Here we are! Chapter two! Please let me know what you think in a review! I would love to hear your thoughts!**


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